Altered Perspective

You might’ve seen a movie about mental illness or maybe read a book or two. Fight Club, for example, is one of my favorites—one that deals with the protagonist’s struggle with a seemingly undiagnosed mental illness (I’m trying really hard not to spoil anything for anyone here…)

Mental illnesses are portrayed in a variety of ways in the media, but when you experience them in your own life, they can manifest in ways you might not expect. My experience with depression is probably similar to a lot of others’ experiences, but it’s also probably different in a few ways. But that’s not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about what it’s like to experience mental illness through the lens of someone you care about.

My dad has dissociative identity disorder—more commonly known as multiple personality disorder—a disorder I couldn’t even begin to truly comprehend when my parents told me about it.

Over the last year or so, my family went through a really tough time. My dad’s behavior had altered drastically with no real explanation for it. He was at times incredibly reckless and irrational, but he had little recollection of the things that he’d been doing other than vague feelings of guilt and regret. As most people with a mental illness will tell you, admitting that you’re struggling is often the scariest and most daunting part.

Most of the time, people with DID have their own personality, but they also have other states known as “alters.” When an alter is in control, a person’s entire personality can change. Their voice, eyesight, and behaviors change in affect. Alters don’t even have to be the same gender or age as the person, which can cause much confusion for the person with the disorder, not to mention their friends and family.

My dad’s DID is a little different. As far as we know, all of his alters are the same person as my dad, but they’re stuck at different ages in his life when he experienced emotionally stressful times due to abuse, absent parents, and so on. These events caused him to compartmentalize his emotions to cope, and over the years, stress and an ongoing battle with depression caused these alters to break the surface. The main problem with this was since the alters were all still my dad, per se, it initially was not obvious what the problem was.

The pieces first started falling into place for my mom before I was aware of what was going on. One day, my mom decided to test her hunch and asked my dad–her husband of more than twenty years–how old he was. He said he was seventeen. It was the first real piece of evidence that led to my dad’s diagnosis.

When my mom told me this over the phone, I couldn’t wrap my head around what that meant. My already strained relationship with my dad became even more estranged when I talked to him on the phone. He answered the phone, but something sounded off in his voice. My father, who always called me by a nickname, now referred to me by my full name. The conversation was relatively normal, but the conversation ended abruptly after he started choking up and gave the phone to my mom.

I thought it couldn’t get any weirder at that point, but after talking to my mom for a few minutes, she told me that my dad wanted to talk to me again. We had an almost identical conversation, except this time he sounded normal. This time he called me by my nickname. When my mom came back on the phone, she tried to explain to me what had happened when I asked why I just had the same conversation with my dad twice. I started crying and hung up the phone because I couldn’t understand what I had just experienced.

I barely spoke to my dad after that. My mom would encourage me to text or call him, but I rarely did. I didn’t want to have to face another phone call like that one. I felt guilty for doing that to him, but in light of everything else going on, I wasn’t mentally strong enough to make the effort. I was battling my own depression, and I couldn’t bring myself to take on someone else’s problems in addition to my own. Writing it now, I feel extremely selfish, but I knew that I needed to be stronger to deal with the situation in the right way.

It took my great-grandmother and grandmother’s deaths the following summer to bring my dad and I a little bit closer to mending our relationship. Losing two family members that played such an important role in his life brought out the helpless little boy in him, quite literally. To be clear, the loss of his mom and grandmother evoked his two youngest alters, which are six and nine years old respectively, and as such, he was inconsolable during the funerals. Watching your dad cry uncontrollably is incredibly discomforting. All I could do was try to be supportive when I really wanted to run away.

One day, my mom decided to test her hunch and asked my dad–her husband of more than twenty years–how old he was. He said he was seventeen. It was the first real piece of evidence that led to my dad’s diagnosis.

My mom can make jokes about the situation, mostly done as a way to cope and make it seem normal. In attempt to help me understand, she used to try to throw me into conversations with his alters. After that backfired, she decided to let me pretend like things were the way they used to be on the rare occasions that I’m home. My dad and I talk much more frequently now, and if I talk to one of his alters, I usually don’t notice. I prefer to keep it this way because I’m not around my dad often enough to learn how to deal with this head on.

I honestly don’t know when or if I’ll be able to completely accept whom my dad has become. It’s difficult to say what will happen in the future, but the complete change in someone I’d known my whole life was obviously a shock. I want very much to be as strong as my mom is, and I think she’s a saint for loving him so completely even though he’s not completely the man he used to be. But right now, I can’t be that person.

Until I have my own mental illness better managed, tackling this new dynamic with my dad isn’t going to work. My dad knows that I love him, but he also knows that I have to do what’s right for me at this moment in my life. When it comes to your mental health, sometimes you have to be a little selfish in order to avoid completely destroying a relationship or yourself in the process. A wise friend once told me that you have to take care of yourself first if you’re going to take care of other people. I wholeheartedly believe in that sentiment. Just know that it’s okay to save yourself first.

-OU Alumna